Dear LPG,

I am wondering if anyone else feels like I do today.   I have lived a long life and for the most part I like who I am.  I do have the odd regret but there are a few things that I really don’t like about the person that people who meet me, know me, are closest to me and will meet me in the future will perceive; even if I take on board that there are always going to be a few people that each of us encounter in our lives who we are always going to have personality clashes with.

I am a real believer that the only person who can change who I am, is me (with the help of the good Lord above).  I know that I am not unique in this respect but I have come to this conclusion.  I have yet to find one person on this earth who is perfectly satisfied with who they are and it appears to be relatively easy to work out what it is that we don’t like about ourselves, if there is anything.  The problem is that many of us come to that realisation, keep the realisation to ourselves, put it on the back burner and then use it as an excuse to justify the thing we so dislike.

The bit we forget to do is work out how we are going to improve from being less like the person with the trait that we are not entirely happy with, and then progress to being more like the person we would prefer others to see, both inside and out.  For many it will be that they are people who still smoke and would rather not, and people (like me) who overeat and cannot help it, but those are not the only traits that I am talking about here.

So many of us would like to change our tendencies to wallow in the emotions of flippancy, laziness, anger, despair, inability to forgive others, publically accepting blame for some things that we have done, or one of the many other aspects of our personality or even some ambition that we regret not having started yet that we can let get the better of us.    The bit we forget to do is work out how we are going to improve it.

Getting to grips with a pen and a bit of paper and logically working out what steps you will have to take to make the change is the way forward.    I understand that we cannot fix everything alone but making a plan and sticking to it can make such a difference. Even if step one is getting someone to help you or make sure that you really do what your plan outlines.  This is exactly the job of a life coach and even though most of them are more concerned with helping younger people achieve big business ambitions, making a positive personal change in life is an ambition too.   Accepting that we need someone else’s help could be the first step on the way to making a plan which will gradually change what we dislike about ourselves for the better so gradually that people look at us differently without even knowing when the change occurred.  

I think that many life coaches charge way too much money for their services but I did a life coaching course when I first retired, not because of all the potential money that can be made if you are really successful, but because I was told that it is a really good way of evaluating your own life.  It taught me a lot.

CL, Bellingham.

LPG did a little research and life coaching courses can be quite expensive however we found some relatively cheap taster courses that you can do online if you are really interested in finding out more.

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